Virtue's Last Reward Part 1: Lock-Blocking
by
, February 15th, 2014 at 02:16 PM (6402 Views)
Spoilers for 999 and partial spoilers for VLR below, read at your own peril.
Just got Virtue's Last Reward, the sequel to Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, and been playing it extensively. The puzzles are nice and it definitely feels like a 999 sequel. Just got both the K ending and the Clover Ending and dear god was it nice to actually get an ending after all that time. I like how it used the morphogenetic field so much more liberally after the big reveal of the first game. That was nice. Seeing Sigma bewilderingly shout at Alice after going down the "Betray" route and having her choose "Ally" contrary to what she chose when he chose "Ally" was really satisfying, especially seeing how I felt the exact same thing he did.
What isn't so nice, or at least got really annoying after 20 hours of playing, was getting lock-blocked everywhere. Maybe I have really good luck to instinctively go down all the important routes first (or in this case bad luck), but getting lock-blocked 6 times in a row (technically 5, seeing how it was a computer and not an actual lock...) is pretty ridiculous. Getting lock-blocked again after clearing one lock is also kinda frustrating, but it is on a strange route already, so that's to be expected.
With only one real unclear route and two "Be a dick to Luna/Phi" routes left, I do hope I don't get lock-blocked continuously again.
Also, Dio is a douche. Two endings done and 6 lock-block in, Dio is a super-douche.